Microsoft is making the tools that its own researchers use to speed up advances in artificial intelligence available to a broader group of developers by releasing its Computational Network Toolkit on GitHub. The researchers developed the open-source toolkit, dubbed CNTK, out of necessity. Xuedong Huang, Microsoft’s chief speech scientist, said he and his team were anxious to make faster improvements to how well computers can understand speech, and the tools they had to work with were slowing them down. So, a group of volunteers set out to solve this problem on their own, using a homegrown solution that stressed performance over all else. The effort paid off. In internal tests, Huang said CNTK has proved more efficient than four other popular computational toolkits that developers use to create deep learning…